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Introduction The idea for this book surfaced over coffee in Havana in 2001. Despite having known each other for years, we had never worked together. One evening, after discussing common interests and friends, we discovered that we were both thinking about researching British Caribbean immigration to Cuba. The conclusion quickly became obvious: we should work together. Not only did this idea appeal to us both, but practical considerations came to mind. Sure, we could do our individual research and write two books on the same topic but, if we did that, each book would have serious limitations. On Chailloux’s side, the financial and bureaucratic challenges of researching outside Cuba—especially in England—were too large to resolve. For Whitney, to do a good job it would be necessary to travel to and work in remote corners of eastern Cuba that were not easy for Cubans to get to, let alone foreigners. Again, bureaucratic and practical considerations came to mind, not the least of which was getting special permission to stay in places that were hard to get to and where there were no hotels or places to rent a room. We knew that if we worked separately, each of us would write only half the story that needed to be told. Hence, this jointly researched and written book. Our shared conviction and motivation for writing this book is the idea that we cannot adequately understand twentieth-century Cuban history and society without understanding the island’s connections to the Caribbean . It is important to emphasize here that we are talking about the twentieth century and not the long colonial period (1492–1898). Historians of Cuba and the Caribbean have long pointed out the significance of Cuba’s connections to Saint-Domingue, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, Jamaica , Barbados, and the wider Atlantic world.1 Cuba’s ties with the North American mainland, both before and after the American Revolution, have 2 · Subjects or Citizens: British Caribbean Workers in Cuba, 1900–1960 also been well documented.2 Nor should our emphasis on the twentieth century encourage the belief that British Caribbean migration (whether forced or “free”) to Cuba began in 1900. The presence of British Caribbean workers (as with Haitians) in twentieth-century Cuba did not occur in a historical vacuum. As Joseph Dorsey pointed out in a seminal article some time ago, as early as the 1830s and 1840s Jamaicans and Bahamians were brought to Cuba either as slaves or reenslaved workers to work in eastern Cuba, mostly around Holguin, where more than five thousand Jamaicans labored on sugar and other plantations. The British Caribbean presence was so strong that the region was known locally as “Little England” and “Little London.”3 There is also some tantalizing evidence in Cuban and Jamaican archives about Jamaicans who fought under the command of Antonio Maceo during Cuba’s second war of independence (1895–98). So while the nature of British Caribbean migration to Cuba in the twentieth century was very different from what took place in the nineteenth, the idea among Cuban (and other) plantation owners that British Caribbean workers could be a source of cheap, exploitable labor was not new. Twentieth-century Cuba was the only Caribbean and Latin American country that received large numbers of both white (mostly from Spain) and black (mostly from Haiti and the British Caribbean) immigrants. By the 1930s, half of Cuba’s population of four million people had arrived after 1898, and even more were first-generation Cubans who had not witnessed or experienced the transition from colony to republic. One of our central points in this book is that we do not usually think of Cuba as a nation of immigrants, but perhaps we should. Cuba was a major hub of the transatlantic Hispanic and African diasporas throughout the long colonial period, but we can too easily forget that the island was at the center of circum-Caribbean diasporas in the first half of the twentieth century. Historians certainly mention—but usually only in passing—the large-scale importation of Haitian and British Caribbean workers for the booming Cuban sugar industry between 1916 and 1925.4 But on the whole, readers are left with the impression that after 1898 Cuba’s ties to the Caribbean were at best incidental and of no real significance for Cuban society. It is possible, apparently, to study twentieth-century Cuba in isolation from the wider Caribbean. For example, remarkably few books or articles compare the history and development...

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